April 15, 2013 • 22 mins
Mildred and Richard Loving's relationship went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court when they were arrested for breaking Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws. On June 20, 1963, Mildred wrote a letter to the ACLU asking for help. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and
we are going to talk for this episode and another episode.
(00:24):
So a two parter about a court case that has
been in the news a lot lately, and that is
the case of Loving versus Virginia. Indeed, it's been discussed
often because there we're in the midst of another legal
battle in the US and it's actually going on in
other countries as well about marriage equality and so where
(00:47):
you find ourselves often looking back at previous cases that
have gone to the Supreme Court right and this particular
one has been cited explicitly pretty often in the ongoing
debate that's before the Supreme Court as we record this,
and it's about Richard and Mildred Loving. They were a
couple whose relationship took them all the way to the
(01:09):
Supreme Court. Richard was white and Mildred was African American
and Native American, and when they got married in nine
fifty eight, it was illegal for them to be married
in Virginia, where they live, and it was also illegal
and twenty four other states at that time. The Supreme
Court's ruling overturned their conviction and avoided all the antim
(01:29):
assassination laws that were still in existence in sixteen states
at that point and in the greater context of the
civil rights movement. Mildred and Richard got married after Brown
versus Board of Education outlied school segregation, after the Montgomery
bus boycott, and before the Greensborough lunch counter sit ins.
(01:50):
Their legal battle to return home to Virginia began after
a series of enforced school and university integrations and not
long after the assassination of civil rights leader Mega Evers.
The school and university integrations actually played a pretty big
part and and maybe some of the Supreme Court's reluctance
to talk about this issue, which we'll talk about a
(02:11):
little bit more in the second part. So we're gonna
tell this story in two parts. Today's part talks about
the Lovings themselves, how it is that they wound up
before the Supreme Court, as well as the legal context
of race and marriage at the time. And then in
the second part of this story we'll get into the
actual Supreme Court proceedings. They're a whole lot easier to
make sense of when you understand sort of the legal
(02:34):
context of what was going on at the time and
the laws that had been on the books in the past.
So we're gonna start talking about Richard and Mildred. Yes,
indeed so. Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Dolores Jeter grew
up in Central Point, Virginia, which is north of Richmond.
The area had a reputation for being relatively laid back
in terms of race relations, the kind of place that
(02:55):
people just wanted to be left alone and leave one
another alone. It had a very live and let livement lady.
They had known each other since she was eleven and
he was seventeen, but they hadn't gone to the same
schools because the schools were segregated. Their families had been
friends and neighbors. Richard's mother was a licensed midwife, and
she eventually delivered their three children, who were named Peggy, Donald,
(03:18):
and Sydney. And Richard and Mildred decided to marry after
Mildred found out she was expecting a child. He was
a bricklayer and was twenty four and she was eighteen.
Her mother was part Rappahannock Indian and her father was
part Cherokee. She generally identified herself as Indian, but under
Virginia law she was classified as negro or black. So
(03:41):
on June tewod N eight, they got married in Washington,
d C. Which was about a hundred miles away from
where they lived. They had gone to d C to
get married because it was illegal in Virginia for a
white person to marry someone of another race. Mildred did
not know this. It was also in illegal in Virginia
for a couple to go somewhere else in order to
(04:03):
get married and then come back to Virginia. Richard did
not know that part, so both of them were unaware
of some of the law that was governing their relationship
at that point. So back in Central Point, at two
am on July eleven, Caroline County, Virginia Sheriff our Garnet
Brooks and two deputies entered the bedroom where the now
(04:25):
married couple were sleeping after following an anonymous tip. This
is sort of the one red flag of the live
and let live leave one another alone that has really
come up and in terms of the community in this story,
h The sheriff asked them what they were doing together,
and Richard pointed to the marriage certificate that was hanging
on the wall, at which point they were arrested for
(04:47):
breaking Virginia's anti missagination laws. Just as a side note,
the word misagynation has a first known use of eighteen
sixty three, and it was in common use by the
eighteen sixty four presidential election and pamphlets that were made
by opponents of Abraham Lincoln, so it was used as
sort of a fear stoking technique. It was sort of
(05:08):
the the eighteen sixties version of the slippery slope. If
slaves were freed, the misgenation was the next inevitable step,
So it was a sort of a word that was
coined in light of the battle over slavery in the
United States. So Richard was released on bail after spending
the night in jail following the arrest. Mildred was denied
(05:31):
bail and actually had to stay in jail for four
days until their hearing. Because of Virginia law, they were
required to live apart, so Mildred and Richard each lived
with their parents. Their hearings took place in Bowling Green, Virginia,
and Richards was on July seventy eight and Virginia's was
on October thirteenth of that year. They each pleaded not
(05:52):
guilty to the charges against them. Judge Edwards, still the third,
rejected their please and sent the case to the grand
juror re But before they could appear before the grand jury,
Mildred actually gave birth to a baby boy. Their lawyer,
Frank Beasley, advised both of them to plead guilty, and
his hope was that the judge would be lenient on
(06:12):
them if if they entered a guilty plea. So on
January six, nifty nine, Judge Leon M. Basil found Richard
and mild and Mildred guilty. He sentenced them to a
year in prison, but he suspended the sentence that they
would move out of the state and live somewhere else
for twenty five years, so he effectively banished them from
(06:33):
the state of Virginia. They could each visit Virginia, but
not together. They couldn't enter the state together, and they
couldn't be together within the state, so they went to
live with Mildred's cousin in Washington, d c. Mildred went
back home to Virginia for the births of two more children,
but Richard couldn't be there with her for them, and
they really weren't happy living in Washington, d c. They
(06:56):
wanted to be able to go home together at least
to visit their ends and family, and they didn't have
a lot of money, so they couldn't afford an attorney
to appeal their case or try to fight the court order.
Mildred's cousin suggested that she right to Robert F. Kennedy,
who was the U. S. Attorney General at the time,
thinking that he might be able to lift the court
order against them, and Robert F. Kennedy's advice was that
(07:19):
they contact the American Civil Liberties Union. On June twentie,
nineteen sixty three, Mildred wrote a letter to the a
c LU to ask them for help, and one line
of it read, we know we can't live there, but
we would like to go back once in a while
to visit our families and friends. She was not aware,
neither of them were aware of exactly how big of
(07:42):
a battle that letter was going to launch. One of
their lawyers from the a c l U was named
Bernard or Bernard Cohen, and uh Cohen's explanation of this
was they just were in love with one another and
wanted the right to live together a husband and wife
in Virginia without any interference from officialdom. When I told
(08:05):
Richard that this case was in all likelihood going to
go to the Supreme Court of the United States, he
became wide eyed and his jaw dropped. So what we're
gonna talk about next is the sort of the legal
backstory that you need to have in your minds once
we actually get to the Supreme Court. A lot of
these are pretty difficult cases, and you know, they involve
(08:26):
actual people, which is one of the things that makes
this kind of hard to talk about. I think a
lot of times when you read the legal synopsis of
of Supreme Court arguments, the people involved are kind of
left out, or at least I think obscured. It's a
much smaller role. And so a lot of the cases
that we're going to talk about, we were going to
talk about who these people are and why this mattered
(08:49):
to them. So this was obviously a pivotal moment in
the civil rights movement, but it didn't happen in isolation.
It followed a really long history of laws and court
challenges that had already happened in the United States starting
as early as the colonies. Uh, these aren't the only
cases in laws that were cited in the context of
Loving versus Virginia, but these are all particularly notable ones.
(09:12):
So we started in sixteen sixty one when Virginia was
the first colony to pass a ban on interracial marriage,
and then we're going to hop forward to the Civil
War and the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in eighteen
sixty eight, was part of reconstruction, and it granted citizenship
to everyone born or naturalized in the United States and
also stated that states could not deprive any person of life, liberty,
(09:35):
or property without due process of law, nor deny any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. So,
according to the Fourteenth Amendment, both the federal government and
state governments must give all citizens equal protection and due process,
and all people born in the United States or naturalized
were citizens. In eighteen seventy eight, Virginia made it illegal
(09:58):
for people of different is to leave the state and
mary elsewhere and then return. In the same year, the
Virginia Supreme Court issued a decision and Kenny versus the Commonwealth,
which was the case of a white man who had
been living with a black woman. Similarly, they had gone
to Washington, d c. To get married because they couldn't
get married in Virginia, which meant that their marriage was
(10:20):
invalid in Virginia. So the court upheld their guilty verdict
in Kenny versus Commonwealth, and in this decision the Court
called interracial marriages quote so unnatural that God and nature
seemed to forbid them. The Kenny Versus Commonwealth ruling also
cited an eighteen seventy eight bigamy case Reynolds versus United States.
(10:42):
In this case, George Reynolds, who was Brigham Young's secretary,
had been found guilty of bigamy. He was Mormon, and
he challenged the federal government's anti bigamy laws, arguing that
they violated his First Amendment rights to freedom of religion.
The Supreme Court upheld states rights to handle their own
marriage laws. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Morris R.
(11:02):
Waite said, quote, it is impossible to believe that the
constitutional guarantee of religious freedom was intended to prohibit legislation
in respect to this most important feature of social life.
The ruling was at the First Amendment protected belief, not
religious practices. That were criminal in this case bigamy. In
eighty three, Pace versus Alabama focused on the relationship between
(11:26):
Tony Pace, who was black, and Mary Jay Cox, who
was white. They were living together but not married. The
Supreme Court upheld the law itself, which prohibited relationships between
unmarried people, including unmarried people of different races, But the
Supreme Court also found that the penalty was different for
couples of the same race versus interracial couples, and that
(11:48):
aspect was viewed as unconstitutional. So in Pace versus Alabama,
the Supreme Court upheld antim assasination laws as long as
the punishment didn't differ in how severe it was for
full of different races. Then, in the early nineteen hundreds,
as immigrants of various races and ethnicities were coming into
the United States, many states actually passed laws prohibiting in
(12:11):
interracial relationships, and the federal government pass laws banning or
restricting the number of immigrants from specific countries. There was
a really increasing focus on the idea of racial purity,
especially on the racial purity specifically of white people, and
that meant that the country are the states that were
passing these laws also had to define who counted as
(12:33):
quote white, So in Virginia the law became increasingly narrow
about who was classified as a white person. Before nineteen ten,
anyone with or more African blood was considered to be black.
That dropped to fifteen in nineteen ten, and then the
one drop rule came under the Racial Integrity Act of
(12:55):
nineteen twenty four, So in Virginia it became more and
more act of who was classified as a white person
under state law. Under the Racial Integrity Statute, Section fifty nine,
marriages between white and quote colored people were a felony.
Both parties could be sentenced to between one and five
(13:17):
years in prison, and in section eight, inter racial couples
who were living in Virginia who married in another state
and then returned to Virginia faced the same penalty because
they were leaving the state to evade the law. These
are the two sections of the Racial Integrity Statute that
Richard and Mildred Loving had been charged with and had
(13:37):
pled guilty to breaking. Many states had repealed their anti
missaggenation laws by the time the Loving case actually made
it to the Supreme Court. Antimissagenation laws had been struck
down in California, Nevada and Arizona in the late nineteen
fifties after court cases there. However, sixteen states, all of
them southern or bordering on Southern states, still outlawed into
(14:00):
racial marriages, and all of these sixteen misgenation codes had
been upheld by lower courts. So we talked a little
bit earlier about how a lot of this was going on.
After Brown versus the Board of Education outlawed school segregation,
the United States Supreme Court had declined to hear several
cases that were related to interracial marriage in the years
(14:23):
leading up to Loving versus Virginia. It seemed to outside
observers that in the aftermath of Brown versus the Board
of Education, when there had been a violent backlash, when
law enforcement had had to force schools to integrate all
kinds of demonstrations and killings, that the court just seemed
reluctant to get into the idea of race relations in
(14:45):
the South. But not long before being presented with the
Loving case, the Supreme Court had heard the case of
McLaughlin versus Florida. In question was Florida Statute seven nine
eight point zero five, which stayed quote any Negro man
and white woman or any white man and Negro woman
who are not married to each other, who habitually live
(15:07):
in and occupy in the nighttime the same room, shall
each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve months, or
by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars. There was no
similar law in Florida for couples of the same race.
There were other laws outlawing adultery and lewd cohabitation, but
these required proof for conviction, and seven nine eight point
(15:29):
zero five did not. The case actually went before the U. S.
Supreme Court in December of nineteen sixty four, and although
it didn't apply to antim assassination laws as a whole,
the court unanimously struck down the Florida law requiring different
proof based on race violated the equal protection clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment. It was while the McLaughlin case was
(15:50):
being prepared that Mildred's Mildred Loving's letter arrived at the
a c l U. The a c LU had been
on the lookout for cases that would help them take
down the antim degenation laws, and that is where we're
going to stop with Part one. That's the context for
what was going on in the world and what was
going on in the law leading up to the actual
(16:12):
Supreme Court hearing, which we will talk about in the
next episode. Do you also have listener mail? I do,
and it is just coincidentally. It's a completely apt email
to go with this episode today. It came in over
the weekend. It's from Zelda. Zelda says Holly and Tracy. Recently,
the new Bioshot game came out for PS three, Xbox
(16:35):
and PC and a lot of people have gotten really angry.
Why well, it takes place in nineteen twelve and acknowledges
the horror and amount of racism during that time. While
I'm busy with school, so I haven't played it myself yet.
From what I've seen, it's a balanced representation of nineteen twelve. However,
I think a lot of people aren't really aware of
the extent of racism at that time, even in the North.
(16:57):
I would love to see, or here rather an episode
about an individual who overcame racism in the nineteen tens, twenties,
and thirties. So what does this have to do with
the Supreme Court? Third, Good Marshal, my favorite historical lawyer
and Supreme Court Justice was born in nineteen o eight
and had to deal with this kind of racism during
his youth and much of his adulthood. I think he
(17:18):
would be a great podcast subject, especially in light of
controversy in one of America's favorite video game franchises. Thank
you so much for your fantastic work. I look forward
to hearing the next episode. So first, thank you, Zelda. Second,
when this email arrived, I was playing BioShock Infinite UM
and I was not aware at how many people on
(17:41):
the Internet were really angry about BioShock Infinite and calling
the game racist because it depicts racism. Uh, and it
does depict racism in a really blunt and frank and
shocking way. One of the very first things that you
have to do in the game is make a decision
between just a horror fine to me racist act and
(18:03):
the not racist act, which is also I haven't played
it yet, but that's the other option is also horrifying,
right there. Well, either one is you're you're going to
throw a baseball at someone, right and you get to choose,
or you're gonna throw the baseball at an interracial couple,
or are you going to throw the baseball at the
announcer who's raffling off the choice to throw the baseball.
(18:26):
I mean, it's an upsetting thing. It was a thing
where I paused it and was like, what is going on? Um?
And there's a lot when you're walking around the world
of BioShock Infinite there there are like propaganda posters. There's
also pretty early in the game. Bathrooms are a big
thing in the BioShock frantise. You're like always in these
(18:47):
trainspotting bathrooms in BioShock and the train spotting bathrooms and
BioShock are the ones that are labeled for colored and Irish.
It's upsetting, and it's a it's upsetting to a modern player.
And then they are people who who are interpreting this
as racist. My argument is that depicting something is not
(19:08):
the same as endorsing it, and it's pretty clear in
the context of the game that racism is bad. I
went I went looking around trying to find historical propaganda posters,
uh to kind of compare to what's in BioShock, because
he knew that a lot of them have historical routes.
But I have not yet found the examples that I found.
(19:29):
The examples from later from like World War Two. There
are some really stunningly racially charged World War Two posters
of propaganda from the United States. Um so yes, thank
you very much Selda for sending this. It's uh, I
think particularly relevant to both the game and what we're
(19:49):
talking about in this episode. Today. Holly and I were talking,
I think yesterday about how the view of the civil
rights movement that many people learn in schools is very
same tis Yeah, it's similar to what you said earlier.
When we're discussing and learning it, particularly in school, when um,
you know, it's often being presented as facts to remember,
(20:11):
we lose track of the actual people that were involved
and affected and suffering in many cases, and so it's
it's easy to not really think about the human condition
involved in some of these elements. Right. I have not
gotten to the end of BioShock Infinite yet, so I
can't really comment on how the story goes from beginning
to end. There are definitely things to be angry about
(20:31):
in that game. It's extremely violent and extremely gratuitously graphically violent.
But the racism, I think is presented in a way
that is horrifying. It's also reflective of the arrow when
the game is set well when it's the villain of
the piece, if I'm understanding correctly, because as I said,
I haven't played it yet. Right, the whole, like the
(20:52):
whole idea of white supremacy and American exceptionalism like those
are definitely villains in BioShock Infinite It. So yes, thank
you very much for that that suggestion and that ascute letter, Zelda.
If you would like to write to us, you can.
We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
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(21:15):
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learn more about what we've talked about in this episode,
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the civil rights movement worked. You can do all of
(21:36):
that and more at our website with this how stuff
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(22:02):
of Stuff You Missed in History Class is brought to
you by Audible
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and
we are going to talk for this episode and another episode.
(00:24):
So a two parter about a court case that has
been in the news a lot lately, and that is
the case of Loving versus Virginia. Indeed, it's been discussed
often because there we're in the midst of another legal
battle in the US and it's actually going on in
other countries as well about marriage equality and so where
(00:47):
you find ourselves often looking back at previous cases that
have gone to the Supreme Court right and this particular
one has been cited explicitly pretty often in the ongoing
debate that's before the Supreme Court as we record this,
and it's about Richard and Mildred Loving. They were a
couple whose relationship took them all the way to the
(01:09):
Supreme Court. Richard was white and Mildred was African American
and Native American, and when they got married in nine
fifty eight, it was illegal for them to be married
in Virginia, where they live, and it was also illegal
and twenty four other states at that time. The Supreme
Court's ruling overturned their conviction and avoided all the antim
(01:29):
assassination laws that were still in existence in sixteen states
at that point and in the greater context of the
civil rights movement. Mildred and Richard got married after Brown
versus Board of Education outlied school segregation, after the Montgomery
bus boycott, and before the Greensborough lunch counter sit ins.
(01:50):
Their legal battle to return home to Virginia began after
a series of enforced school and university integrations and not
long after the assassination of civil rights leader Mega Evers.
The school and university integrations actually played a pretty big
part and and maybe some of the Supreme Court's reluctance
to talk about this issue, which we'll talk about a
(02:11):
little bit more in the second part. So we're gonna
tell this story in two parts. Today's part talks about
the Lovings themselves, how it is that they wound up
before the Supreme Court, as well as the legal context
of race and marriage at the time. And then in
the second part of this story we'll get into the
actual Supreme Court proceedings. They're a whole lot easier to
make sense of when you understand sort of the legal
(02:34):
context of what was going on at the time and
the laws that had been on the books in the past.
So we're gonna start talking about Richard and Mildred. Yes,
indeed so. Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Dolores Jeter grew
up in Central Point, Virginia, which is north of Richmond.
The area had a reputation for being relatively laid back
in terms of race relations, the kind of place that
(02:55):
people just wanted to be left alone and leave one
another alone. It had a very live and let livement lady.
They had known each other since she was eleven and
he was seventeen, but they hadn't gone to the same
schools because the schools were segregated. Their families had been
friends and neighbors. Richard's mother was a licensed midwife, and
she eventually delivered their three children, who were named Peggy, Donald,
(03:18):
and Sydney. And Richard and Mildred decided to marry after
Mildred found out she was expecting a child. He was
a bricklayer and was twenty four and she was eighteen.
Her mother was part Rappahannock Indian and her father was
part Cherokee. She generally identified herself as Indian, but under
Virginia law she was classified as negro or black. So
(03:41):
on June tewod N eight, they got married in Washington,
d C. Which was about a hundred miles away from
where they lived. They had gone to d C to
get married because it was illegal in Virginia for a
white person to marry someone of another race. Mildred did
not know this. It was also in illegal in Virginia
for a couple to go somewhere else in order to
(04:03):
get married and then come back to Virginia. Richard did
not know that part, so both of them were unaware
of some of the law that was governing their relationship
at that point. So back in Central Point, at two
am on July eleven, Caroline County, Virginia Sheriff our Garnet
Brooks and two deputies entered the bedroom where the now
(04:25):
married couple were sleeping after following an anonymous tip. This
is sort of the one red flag of the live
and let live leave one another alone that has really
come up and in terms of the community in this story,
h The sheriff asked them what they were doing together,
and Richard pointed to the marriage certificate that was hanging
on the wall, at which point they were arrested for
(04:47):
breaking Virginia's anti missagination laws. Just as a side note,
the word misagynation has a first known use of eighteen
sixty three, and it was in common use by the
eighteen sixty four presidential election and pamphlets that were made
by opponents of Abraham Lincoln, so it was used as
sort of a fear stoking technique. It was sort of
(05:08):
the the eighteen sixties version of the slippery slope. If
slaves were freed, the misgenation was the next inevitable step,
So it was a sort of a word that was
coined in light of the battle over slavery in the
United States. So Richard was released on bail after spending
the night in jail following the arrest. Mildred was denied
(05:31):
bail and actually had to stay in jail for four
days until their hearing. Because of Virginia law, they were
required to live apart, so Mildred and Richard each lived
with their parents. Their hearings took place in Bowling Green, Virginia,
and Richards was on July seventy eight and Virginia's was
on October thirteenth of that year. They each pleaded not
(05:52):
guilty to the charges against them. Judge Edwards, still the third,
rejected their please and sent the case to the grand
juror re But before they could appear before the grand jury,
Mildred actually gave birth to a baby boy. Their lawyer,
Frank Beasley, advised both of them to plead guilty, and
his hope was that the judge would be lenient on
(06:12):
them if if they entered a guilty plea. So on
January six, nifty nine, Judge Leon M. Basil found Richard
and mild and Mildred guilty. He sentenced them to a
year in prison, but he suspended the sentence that they
would move out of the state and live somewhere else
for twenty five years, so he effectively banished them from
(06:33):
the state of Virginia. They could each visit Virginia, but
not together. They couldn't enter the state together, and they
couldn't be together within the state, so they went to
live with Mildred's cousin in Washington, d c. Mildred went
back home to Virginia for the births of two more children,
but Richard couldn't be there with her for them, and
they really weren't happy living in Washington, d c. They
(06:56):
wanted to be able to go home together at least
to visit their ends and family, and they didn't have
a lot of money, so they couldn't afford an attorney
to appeal their case or try to fight the court order.
Mildred's cousin suggested that she right to Robert F. Kennedy,
who was the U. S. Attorney General at the time,
thinking that he might be able to lift the court
order against them, and Robert F. Kennedy's advice was that
(07:19):
they contact the American Civil Liberties Union. On June twentie,
nineteen sixty three, Mildred wrote a letter to the a
c LU to ask them for help, and one line
of it read, we know we can't live there, but
we would like to go back once in a while
to visit our families and friends. She was not aware,
neither of them were aware of exactly how big of
(07:42):
a battle that letter was going to launch. One of
their lawyers from the a c l U was named
Bernard or Bernard Cohen, and uh Cohen's explanation of this
was they just were in love with one another and
wanted the right to live together a husband and wife
in Virginia without any interference from officialdom. When I told
(08:05):
Richard that this case was in all likelihood going to
go to the Supreme Court of the United States, he
became wide eyed and his jaw dropped. So what we're
gonna talk about next is the sort of the legal
backstory that you need to have in your minds once
we actually get to the Supreme Court. A lot of
these are pretty difficult cases, and you know, they involve
(08:26):
actual people, which is one of the things that makes
this kind of hard to talk about. I think a
lot of times when you read the legal synopsis of
of Supreme Court arguments, the people involved are kind of
left out, or at least I think obscured. It's a
much smaller role. And so a lot of the cases
that we're going to talk about, we were going to
talk about who these people are and why this mattered
(08:49):
to them. So this was obviously a pivotal moment in
the civil rights movement, but it didn't happen in isolation.
It followed a really long history of laws and court
challenges that had already happened in the United States starting
as early as the colonies. Uh, these aren't the only
cases in laws that were cited in the context of
Loving versus Virginia, but these are all particularly notable ones.
(09:12):
So we started in sixteen sixty one when Virginia was
the first colony to pass a ban on interracial marriage,
and then we're going to hop forward to the Civil
War and the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in eighteen
sixty eight, was part of reconstruction, and it granted citizenship
to everyone born or naturalized in the United States and
also stated that states could not deprive any person of life, liberty,
(09:35):
or property without due process of law, nor deny any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. So,
according to the Fourteenth Amendment, both the federal government and
state governments must give all citizens equal protection and due process,
and all people born in the United States or naturalized
were citizens. In eighteen seventy eight, Virginia made it illegal
(09:58):
for people of different is to leave the state and
mary elsewhere and then return. In the same year, the
Virginia Supreme Court issued a decision and Kenny versus the Commonwealth,
which was the case of a white man who had
been living with a black woman. Similarly, they had gone
to Washington, d c. To get married because they couldn't
get married in Virginia, which meant that their marriage was
(10:20):
invalid in Virginia. So the court upheld their guilty verdict
in Kenny versus Commonwealth, and in this decision the Court
called interracial marriages quote so unnatural that God and nature
seemed to forbid them. The Kenny Versus Commonwealth ruling also
cited an eighteen seventy eight bigamy case Reynolds versus United States.
(10:42):
In this case, George Reynolds, who was Brigham Young's secretary,
had been found guilty of bigamy. He was Mormon, and
he challenged the federal government's anti bigamy laws, arguing that
they violated his First Amendment rights to freedom of religion.
The Supreme Court upheld states rights to handle their own
marriage laws. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Morris R.
(11:02):
Waite said, quote, it is impossible to believe that the
constitutional guarantee of religious freedom was intended to prohibit legislation
in respect to this most important feature of social life.
The ruling was at the First Amendment protected belief, not
religious practices. That were criminal in this case bigamy. In
eighty three, Pace versus Alabama focused on the relationship between
(11:26):
Tony Pace, who was black, and Mary Jay Cox, who
was white. They were living together but not married. The
Supreme Court upheld the law itself, which prohibited relationships between
unmarried people, including unmarried people of different races, But the
Supreme Court also found that the penalty was different for
couples of the same race versus interracial couples, and that
(11:48):
aspect was viewed as unconstitutional. So in Pace versus Alabama,
the Supreme Court upheld antim assasination laws as long as
the punishment didn't differ in how severe it was for
full of different races. Then, in the early nineteen hundreds,
as immigrants of various races and ethnicities were coming into
the United States, many states actually passed laws prohibiting in
(12:11):
interracial relationships, and the federal government pass laws banning or
restricting the number of immigrants from specific countries. There was
a really increasing focus on the idea of racial purity,
especially on the racial purity specifically of white people, and
that meant that the country are the states that were
passing these laws also had to define who counted as
(12:33):
quote white, So in Virginia the law became increasingly narrow
about who was classified as a white person. Before nineteen ten,
anyone with or more African blood was considered to be black.
That dropped to fifteen in nineteen ten, and then the
one drop rule came under the Racial Integrity Act of
(12:55):
nineteen twenty four, So in Virginia it became more and
more act of who was classified as a white person
under state law. Under the Racial Integrity Statute, Section fifty nine,
marriages between white and quote colored people were a felony.
Both parties could be sentenced to between one and five
(13:17):
years in prison, and in section eight, inter racial couples
who were living in Virginia who married in another state
and then returned to Virginia faced the same penalty because
they were leaving the state to evade the law. These
are the two sections of the Racial Integrity Statute that
Richard and Mildred Loving had been charged with and had
(13:37):
pled guilty to breaking. Many states had repealed their anti
missaggenation laws by the time the Loving case actually made
it to the Supreme Court. Antimissagenation laws had been struck
down in California, Nevada and Arizona in the late nineteen
fifties after court cases there. However, sixteen states, all of
them southern or bordering on Southern states, still outlawed into
(14:00):
racial marriages, and all of these sixteen misgenation codes had
been upheld by lower courts. So we talked a little
bit earlier about how a lot of this was going on.
After Brown versus the Board of Education outlawed school segregation,
the United States Supreme Court had declined to hear several
cases that were related to interracial marriage in the years
(14:23):
leading up to Loving versus Virginia. It seemed to outside
observers that in the aftermath of Brown versus the Board
of Education, when there had been a violent backlash, when
law enforcement had had to force schools to integrate all
kinds of demonstrations and killings, that the court just seemed
reluctant to get into the idea of race relations in
(14:45):
the South. But not long before being presented with the
Loving case, the Supreme Court had heard the case of
McLaughlin versus Florida. In question was Florida Statute seven nine
eight point zero five, which stayed quote any Negro man
and white woman or any white man and Negro woman
who are not married to each other, who habitually live
(15:07):
in and occupy in the nighttime the same room, shall
each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve months, or
by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars. There was no
similar law in Florida for couples of the same race.
There were other laws outlawing adultery and lewd cohabitation, but
these required proof for conviction, and seven nine eight point
(15:29):
zero five did not. The case actually went before the U. S.
Supreme Court in December of nineteen sixty four, and although
it didn't apply to antim assassination laws as a whole,
the court unanimously struck down the Florida law requiring different
proof based on race violated the equal protection clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment. It was while the McLaughlin case was
(15:50):
being prepared that Mildred's Mildred Loving's letter arrived at the
a c l U. The a c LU had been
on the lookout for cases that would help them take
down the antim degenation laws, and that is where we're
going to stop with Part one. That's the context for
what was going on in the world and what was
going on in the law leading up to the actual
(16:12):
Supreme Court hearing, which we will talk about in the
next episode. Do you also have listener mail? I do,
and it is just coincidentally. It's a completely apt email
to go with this episode today. It came in over
the weekend. It's from Zelda. Zelda says Holly and Tracy. Recently,
the new Bioshot game came out for PS three, Xbox
(16:35):
and PC and a lot of people have gotten really angry.
Why well, it takes place in nineteen twelve and acknowledges
the horror and amount of racism during that time. While
I'm busy with school, so I haven't played it myself yet.
From what I've seen, it's a balanced representation of nineteen twelve. However,
I think a lot of people aren't really aware of
the extent of racism at that time, even in the North.
(16:57):
I would love to see, or here rather an episode
about an individual who overcame racism in the nineteen tens, twenties,
and thirties. So what does this have to do with
the Supreme Court? Third, Good Marshal, my favorite historical lawyer
and Supreme Court Justice was born in nineteen o eight
and had to deal with this kind of racism during
his youth and much of his adulthood. I think he
(17:18):
would be a great podcast subject, especially in light of
controversy in one of America's favorite video game franchises. Thank
you so much for your fantastic work. I look forward
to hearing the next episode. So first, thank you, Zelda. Second,
when this email arrived, I was playing BioShock Infinite UM
and I was not aware at how many people on
(17:41):
the Internet were really angry about BioShock Infinite and calling
the game racist because it depicts racism. Uh, and it
does depict racism in a really blunt and frank and
shocking way. One of the very first things that you
have to do in the game is make a decision
between just a horror fine to me racist act and
(18:03):
the not racist act, which is also I haven't played
it yet, but that's the other option is also horrifying,
right there. Well, either one is you're you're going to
throw a baseball at someone, right and you get to choose,
or you're gonna throw the baseball at an interracial couple,
or are you going to throw the baseball at the
announcer who's raffling off the choice to throw the baseball.
(18:26):
I mean, it's an upsetting thing. It was a thing
where I paused it and was like, what is going on? Um?
And there's a lot when you're walking around the world
of BioShock Infinite there there are like propaganda posters. There's
also pretty early in the game. Bathrooms are a big
thing in the BioShock frantise. You're like always in these
(18:47):
trainspotting bathrooms in BioShock and the train spotting bathrooms and
BioShock are the ones that are labeled for colored and Irish.
It's upsetting, and it's a it's upsetting to a modern player.
And then they are people who who are interpreting this
as racist. My argument is that depicting something is not
(19:08):
the same as endorsing it, and it's pretty clear in
the context of the game that racism is bad. I
went I went looking around trying to find historical propaganda posters,
uh to kind of compare to what's in BioShock, because
he knew that a lot of them have historical routes.
But I have not yet found the examples that I found.
(19:29):
The examples from later from like World War Two. There
are some really stunningly racially charged World War Two posters
of propaganda from the United States. Um so yes, thank
you very much Selda for sending this. It's uh, I
think particularly relevant to both the game and what we're
(19:49):
talking about in this episode. Today. Holly and I were talking,
I think yesterday about how the view of the civil
rights movement that many people learn in schools is very
same tis Yeah, it's similar to what you said earlier.
When we're discussing and learning it, particularly in school, when um,
you know, it's often being presented as facts to remember,
(20:11):
we lose track of the actual people that were involved
and affected and suffering in many cases, and so it's
it's easy to not really think about the human condition
involved in some of these elements. Right. I have not
gotten to the end of BioShock Infinite yet, so I
can't really comment on how the story goes from beginning
to end. There are definitely things to be angry about
(20:31):
in that game. It's extremely violent and extremely gratuitously graphically violent.
But the racism, I think is presented in a way
that is horrifying. It's also reflective of the arrow when
the game is set well when it's the villain of
the piece, if I'm understanding correctly, because as I said,
I haven't played it yet. Right, the whole, like the
(20:52):
whole idea of white supremacy and American exceptionalism like those
are definitely villains in BioShock Infinite It. So yes, thank
you very much for that that suggestion and that ascute letter, Zelda.
If you would like to write to us, you can.
We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash history class
(21:15):
stuff and on Twitter at missed in History. We have
recently launched a tumbler at mt in history dot tumbler
dot com and ron Pinterest. If you would like to
learn more about what we've talked about in this episode,
you can go to our website and put civil Rights
movement into the search bar and you will find how
the civil rights movement worked. You can do all of
(21:36):
that and more at our website with this how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. This episode
(22:02):
of Stuff You Missed in History Class is brought to
you by Audible
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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